I've said it many times now, but I'm very excited for WoW Forever's release. That said, I'm still going into it with eyes wide open. I don't necessarily expect it to live up to its name by being a "forever" game. Primarily, I'm just hoping to recapture a little of that "new adventure" magic that I felt on Turtle WoW and to some degree even in the first weeks of Classic back in 2019/2020. If I can get a few months of entertainment out of that, it'll have been worth checking out. If I manage to make any new social connections, even better. If it ends up being even more than that... great, but I'm not necessarily counting on that.
As mentioned before, I didn't really play the beta myself (not counting simply making a character and running around a bit) but I consumed a lot of content about people's experiences on it, and I've got to say, my overall impression is still that it looks very promising. Where people had complaints, they largely didn't really faze me that much. (Which is not to say that they were bad feedback or completely baseless, just that for me, something like mob dungeon XP for example really doesn't matter much as I rarely do a dungeon more than once while levelling anyway.)
All that said, there are three what I'll call "areas of risk" that I suspect are more likely to make me sour on Forever in the long run than anything else. I hope they won't, I'm just saying that these are the things I'm most concerned about.
#1 - Megaservers and sharding
I've said quite a few times on this blog that I'm not a fan of megaservers, for a number of reasons. I don't like it when the open world feels permanently crowded for example, and I get the impression that most people's (including Blizzard's) idea of what feels like a good population level for a zone does not align with mine. I don't want to compete with ten different people for mobs in every single area. I don't want basic gathering nodes to be a rare treasure because every square inch of the map is constantly being scoured by farmers. I'm way less bothered by a server being quiet than by it feeling overcrowded. This has been a problem for me in Classic more than once.
In Forever though, there's even more to it than that. In Classic, we had layering, which meant that there were multiple versions of each continent running in parallel, but within the layer you were in, wandering the world was a seamless experience that involved running into the same people repeatedly and so on. (It's funny now to remember how adamantly some people were opposed to having layers even just for population management at Classic's launch, while in the present many Classic players will break into a sweat if their addon shows them fewer than ten active layers on their server because surely that's a sign that it's dying. The way the goalposts have shifted on that one is crazy to me.)
It's been kind of lost over time, but there were whole dev talks about this in the run-up to Classic in which they explained why they had to come up with this new technology because of how simply spinning up multiple versions of individual zones would break things and just wouldn't work in a Classic context.
Forever's realmless structure instead has... exactly that thing that the Classic devs originally wanted to avoid at all costs. I'm not sure about the correct term for it - sharding? People keep calling it layering even though that's not what it is, but from a player's perspective it basically seems to behave similarly to cross-realm zones in modern WoW, with the only difference being that there are no named realms; it's just one big pool of players that gets split up or merged by zone, depending on how many characters are active there at any given moment.
The problem is that this adds invisible "seams" all over what's meant to be a seamless world. I've seen people complain about chatting with someone on a boat, and then after the loading screen their friend is gone and they are surrounded by an entirely different crowd. I've seen a video of someone standing at the gates of Orgrimmar and watching character after character vanish into thin air right in front of their eyes as they exit. Another one showed a Horde raid on Ironforge, but the moment the Alliance defenders chased the attackers out the door, they vamoosed into the aether. Neat escape trick for the attackers, but immersion is something else.
This isn't as bad in retail because you'll rarely watch big crowds crossing zone borders there, but that aside, I'm also kind of used to "things suddenly phasing in and out of existence" just being part of retail's jank nowadays. Because you spend so much time travelling by flying mount at high speeds without paying close attention to your immediate surroundings, it doesn't bother me as much there. In a Classic world though, it feels really bad. And it worries me because I don't think it's something that will be fixed.
Sure, maybe the devs will be able to apply some band-aids, such as moving some shard borders to places where people are less likely to watch and notice their buddies vanishing. Maybe they'll manage to find a fix to keep travellers on boats and zeppelins together. But I don't think the overall problem is going to go away, because it seems to be a core part of their intended infrastructure for the game, and I don't see them making any changes to that at this point.
#2 - Community
I already think that the community aspect of Forever will suffer from the megaserver structure and being surrounded by too many people that you can't keep track of or remember. And yes, I know what they said at BlizzCon about the system being supposed to be smart and group you with players you've met before, but if you'll excuse me: I'll believe that when I see it. From reports I saw from the beta, the sharding system struggled enough just to keep people in the same group together sometimes. I know beta is beta, and hopefully what goes live will be better than that, but I'll still be very surprised if it's even remotely as good as Blizzard claimed it would be.
Aside from the general "too many people in one place" problem though, there's also the issue of toxicity and (lack of) moderation. There was some discourse about Asmongold and his followers being a real scourge on the beta and that they should've been banned. I can't tell you how justified that was, and I consider myself lucky that the US/EU split will keep him and many other streamers away from normal people over here, but let's simply put it like this: Blizzard's moderation and customer services haven't had the best reputation for a while, and this is going to be a huge stress test for them. I consider it a real risk that big streamers in particular will be allowed to run roughshod over everyone in their way because they provide publicity for the game, regardless of what kind of picture that paints of the community, and I hope I don't need to explain why I think that would be bad. The realmlessness of it all also means that there's no escape route for players wanting to get away from a certain crowd other than switching play style entirely.
#3 - Continued development direction/progression
Finally, for as much as people have been clamouring for Classic+ for years, I think part of the appeal of Classic for some at least has also been how predictable it is. You roll a warrior and already know at character creation that you've made the "right" choice to be top dps forever.
As the beta progressed, I started to see some videos along the lines of "I was going to make [class A] my main but they nerfed it so now I'll roll a [class B] instead" and all I could think was: Do you think whatever the final state of the beta is will be the state of Forever... forever? Because I think they will continue to make tweaks to things over time. How will it make you feel if the race or class you rolled and rushed to level is suddenly not the best anymore?
That particular example isn't going to be a problem for me, but I do worry whether we could end up in a situation similar to retail where my talent points are reset every other patch, along with new abilities being added and old favourites getting removed - just while adhering to a different design philosophy in terms of how those abilities should work. I'm honestly not even sure what the "correct" answer is here, because classes in Forever shouldn't be completely static if it receives continued development, but I also think that too much change too quickly would kind of go against the spirit of the thing.
Related to this, there is also the spectre of endgame progression. At BlizzCon, there were comments about horizontal progression and how you won't have to worry about falling behind because everything stays relevant, but the devs quickly backpedaled on that because of course they will be new raid tiers and of course they'll give stronger gear than the previous tier because why else would anyone do anything?
I think it was in a BlizzCon or adjacent interview where I heard Ian Hazzikostas once again reiterate that gear upgrades need to be thirty percent (or whatever the exact number was) stronger than the previous tier or else people don't bother with them, and that their internal metrics prove this. Sadly, I think this is just one of those holy cows that Blizzard still can't let go of, even after all the other bold changes they've made since Dragonflight. I'm not saying his metrics are wrong, but a) I thought a major point with Forever was to attract people who aren't already playing your game and b) you have no idea how many players take a look at those "needed" item level jumps and just nope right out of the whole thing before even passing go.
Games with horizontal progression are a thing, and I get that WoW has not traditionally been that kind of game, but I thought they were genuinely trying to dip their toes into new waters with Forever. Instead it now sounds more like they want to treat progression like in every other version of WoW, and if it becomes a problem further down the line, they'll figure it out. I saw Ion's talk about letting go of the idea that every system needs to be future-proof and that sometimes they just want to focus on what's fun now, but I don't think your new game's entire progression system is a good example of how it's OK to just wing it. I don't ever want to see Forever needing an item level squish that makes all low-level food and potions restore literally zero health like happened to retail this year, just because the devs can't stop themselves from constantly increasing the numbers at the top by huge amounts.
Anyone feel like taking any bets on how the above will shake out? Or do you have a completely different feature that you're worried could make or break WoW Forever for you? Feel free to share in the comments.
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